by Beth Kephart
“Who the hell . . .” he started again. “What were they . . .” His fist still finishing his sentences, his eyes searching mine, the sky so big and so wet and so unsafe, unholy.
“It shouldn’t have happened,” he said then.
“I know it,” I said.
“It shouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have. If.”
“Bastards,” I said.
“Worse than that,” he said, and sobbed. The only time in all my life that I ever heard him sob.
It isn’t mud on Meryem’s boots. It isn’t snow. The wrong person brought her to school, and she’s still shivering, scared, in my arms. Herr Palinski is playing Concerto No. 7, and suddenly I don’t want to understand, but I do.
“Tell me, Meryem.”
“I saw her dead,” she says. “I saw Savas hiding.”
“Where, sweetie? Tell me.”
“The canal,” she says. And then she loses her words, too. She loses her world. Unsafe. Unholy.
FRIEDRICHSHAIN
Two wooden rollers, preferably beechwood, cut and lathe turned, fifteen centimeters across, two and a half centimeters thick
A pair of wooden handles
As much half-centimeter steel cable as you can borrow or steal (ask Alexander, come up with a story)
Some steel bolts, sure things (the co-op won’t notice, not if you take just one a day, not if you have deep enough pockets)
Your grandfather’s bow, his quiver of arrows (you’ve practiced enough, you know you can do this)
Two kinds of fishing line (one for guidance, one for real)
Some kind of spool for the cable, some kind of padding so the neighbors won’t hear
Other things you can’t think of right now
All the luck in the world
SO36
I’ve found the reverend. Henni’s come. Out here in the hall I tell them what I know, while inside the classroom Markus sits with the kids on the storytelling rug and teaches them the words to some song. Meryem huddles on his lap holding a stuffed anteater, the long yarn tube of its nose striped green and blue. She doesn’t sing. She rocks.
“What do we know?” the reverend asks. Again.
“That she has seen Savas’s mother. That she believes she is dead. That Savas is hiding.” I will myself to stand very still. If I don’t I will start shaking.
“And you believe what she believes.”
“There is blood on her boots, Reverend.”
He uses the flat of his thumbnail to smooth the strands of his hair. He tips heel to toe, thinking.
“And this was by the canal. Meryem saw her there?”
“She was running after her dog, she says. He must have gotten loose. Or they were playing. Or—I don’t know, actually. Maybe the dog found the body first and started howling. Maybe that’s how it was. But Meryem was there. Early this morning. She got close enough. It’s not mud on her boots. I swear it.”
Henni keeps pulling at the corners of her mouth with one hand. She’s stuffed the fist of the other into her apron pocket. She’s gone halfway down the hallway twice, to call the police from the church secretary’s phone, but each time she’s come back—worried, mumbling. “We don’t know enough,” she’s said. “Since when do our police help the Turkish people?” she’s said. “How can we tell the police without dragging Meryem down to the station to be grilled, and heaven knows, the child’s been through enough.” There are a million reasons not to call, and there are a million reasons that she has to, and the reverend’s going to rub off the last of his hair if he doesn’t stop thumbing it soon.
“I’m worried about Savas,” I say.
“I know you are.” Henni says it.
“Well, aren’t you?”
“I’m worried about all of it, Ada.”
“And that stranger,” I say. “The one who dropped Meryem off. The one in the burqa, who ran.”
“Yes,” she agrees, her shoulders sagging. “That, too.” She turns and watches the kids through the glass pane of the day care door. She smears her hands over the lines in her brow, anxious and undecided, until finally I tell them the only good plan I can think of, the only way out of standing here, still.
“Arabelle,” I say. “From the Köpi.”
“Who?” The reverend takes his hand from his head and fits it down on his hips. He looks at me through his thick glasses, the horizontal stripe between one lens and the other like a crack in ice.
“My best friend,” I say. He looks at Henni and Henni nods, but the reverend shakes his head no.
“We’ll have to bring the authorities in,” he says. “We’ll have to put our faith with them.”
“Do what you need to do,” I say. I am running down the hall and into the wind.
I find Arabelle on the street outside the Köpi, locking her bike to the lamppost, stroking the blue shine of its banana seat like it’s some kind of prize pony. She’s muffed a scarf around her neck and her hair is wild, her coat unzippered, as if she suddenly doesn’t care who knows or not, who might tell Peter.
“Hey,” she says, when she sees me. “What’s up?” Her eyes are dark except for the click of light in the center, like the flash caught off of an invisible camera.
“She’s dead,” I say. “Savas’s mother. Meryem said.” My words in spurts. Choked off. From St. Thomas to the Köpi, by foot—maybe a kilometer. Run against the wind—a good forever.
The light goes out in Arabelle’s eyes. “Are you sure?”
“I can’t cry right now. Okay? I can’t. You just have to help me.” Suddenly I see myself in her eyes—the pale-skinned me with the bright pink hair that’s grown black and a little bleachy at the roots. I see myself: Ada Piekarz, the most independent girl in all Kreuzberg, begging for her best friend’s help because her boyfriend’s locked on the other side and her mother’s much too fragile. Because she needs help after all.
“What are we doing, then?”
“We’re going to the canal.”
“What are we looking for?”
“For Savas. He’s still missing.”
“But the police—”
“The police have been called. The reverend did that. But we need to find him first, we have to, Arabelle. He’ll be too afraid if the police show up. He’ll run even farther. If he’s still running. If—”
“Don’t think like that.”
“He’s just a kid.”
“I know.”
“It’s been days and it’s cold and I—”
“Don’t do this. All right? We don’t have time.” She looks from me to the Köpi and back again. She unlocks her bike from the post and rolls it to me, hesitates. “Wait for me, okay? I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?”
“To tell Felice. She’ll call the ladies. She’ll get them to the shop to talk.”
“There are kilometers of canal,” I say.
“I’ll be quick, Ada. Just wait for me.”
And I stand with the wind in my bones.
FRIEDRICHSHAIN
How like a cat she has become, padding the floor on small feet. When you look back over your shoulder, she’s there. When you study the wall, it’s her shadow. She brings you things. Macaroni and cheese. A pair of gloves from the secondhand shop. A mug of coffee. A new wallet that is an old wallet she found in a dresser drawer. Thank you, you say. Why, you don’t ask. She sits and she doesn’t talk, finger to her lips, eyes closed, thinking.
As if she knows what happened to your Ada. As if she feels the guilt you’ve always felt. The guilt of absence. The shame of not being there.
Today the sun is in the sky and the wind blows and you are off the schedule at the Eisfabrik, at home in your room, lying long on your bed, when you feel her behind you and you turn. She’s brought her book of photographs, the two pieces of its wooden cover laced together with a cord of leather. She holds it like a platter and stands, determined but also uncertain. “Here,” you say, sitting now on the edge of the bed and making room beside you. The
mattress shifts—high, low—like a giant playing seesaw with a mouse.
She’s careful with the book, turns its pages slow so that the grainy black-and-whites don’t slip from their triangle corners. She starts at the start, drawing her finger through time. See how it was, she is saying, not talking. She was once a girl, wearing her hair in vertical curls. Berlin was once not bombs, not razor fences, not men living in boxes near the sky. There are potted plants on windowsills in the boxes she shows me. There are pianos and people who play them and Christmas trees with icicle limbs, and in a corner of a room sometimes, in a wide-winged chair, a woman sits, a boy on her knee.
“Your mother?” you say.
She nods.
“Your brother?”
“Once,” she answers.
She turns the pages, moves time ahead. She grows up, and she’s a teen. The curls are gone and her hair falls wavy to her shoulders, and sometimes the boy is with her, growing up, and sometimes a second girl, beside her, waves to the camera from above a cup of tea or from the marching arches of Oberbaum Bridge or from a plaid blanket by the River Spree.
“Ada’s Omi,” you say.
“Yes.” Barely a whisper. Closing her eyes. Leaving time where it is. Shifting the book of pictures to your lap, the heavy wood and the leather spine, the black pages with their photographs, and if you turn too fast, the pictures will slip, the story. The two girls and the brother and the mother and the man who comes in and out of the pictures now with a pair of polished shoes, a uniform. He stares at you from the picture, through time. He blows the smoke of his cigarette toward you.
“Your father,” you say.
“Yes.”
One more picture, and he’s gone. Two more pages and now the pages are blank, and they go on, blank for a long time, until you turn and turn and get to the other side, where Grossmutter and Omi aren’t little girls anymore, but women with their hair chopped short, the parts under their cheekbones hollow. There is a baby in Omi’s arms. Now there is a baby beside Grossmutter. Now the two of them are out in the sun and the streets are rubble and the girls are growing up, and now there’s a man and the white frame that runs around the picture cannot hold him in. The top of his head is sliced off. The jut of his elbow. The length below his belt. The corner of the pom-pom hat he is holding in one hand. You draw in a sharp breath, lean forward. Your ribs dent your heart.
“Shhhh,” she says, coming close and touching your hand, because you both know how this story turns out. You know what happens to the man too big for the frame. You can’t keep turning, because if you do you’ll find yourself. You’ll find you and him together. Then.
“I’m sorry,” you say, and she shakes her head no.
“You’re a lot like him,” she says. And leaves you like that.
SO36
Arabelle pedals. I hold on from behind, my hands high above the swollen cocoon of her baby, my face whipped by the yarn of her hair. It’s a little after ten, and the people with jobs are mostly at their jobs and everyone else is in the coffee shops or out on the street, keeping warm by the light of their cigarettes. We smell the market before we get there, see the pluming smoke, the fabric dust, hear the zurna songs, smell the salt pools of the wet cheese.
Arabelle slows her bike and crosses through, wheels us around strollers, baskets, wire carts, recycled paper sacks, the thick-socked shoppers until finally we’re through the crowds and over and down along the Landwehrkanal. A dog could get lost here. A kid could run. Someone could be dead, alone. Savas has to trust me.
“Meryem,” I had said. “What do you know?” And she had said that it was just this morning, and she had promised that she would not cross the bridge and that when the dog barked she thought he was crying. She had said there was a fire burning. Squatters’ kindle, maybe. Or something else.
And then what, Meryem?
She’s dead.
Then what, sweetie?
Savas is scared and he’s hiding.
Arabelle screeches back on the brakes, drags her foot on the ground, and stops. I slide off and she unstraddles and wheels the bike forward to the iron fence that separates the banks of the canal from the sandy, slushy path; she locks the bike in. For the first time in what feels like years the sun is in the sky, but still the wind blows cold, and out by a splintered dock an abandoned tug shivers.
We flare out, toward the underpart of trees, the hedges and the broken bits of things, the blue-bottle sculptures, the picnic trash, the smooth-faced houses with eyelid windows that nudge in along the banks—abandoned or taken and rotten. By now the reverend has called the police and back at the Köpi the women are gathering. But here and now, it’s up to us, and besides, it’s me Savas will come to. It’s me who has to find him.
Arabelle fans her hands against her baby as she walks. She scans the water with the camera-click light of her eyes. I run ahead, out, back, trying to think like a murderer. Trying to think like a little boy lost.
“Savas!” A flock of pigeons scatter, a loose grebe. From across the canal, punk crackles on a transistor radio. On the muddy bank of the canal, a pair of old swans squat. There are shadows beneath the bridges, but he isn’t there. There’s a water tank big as some army machine, and I trace its circumference, bend down to my knees, call: nothing.
“Anything?” I call to Arabelle now.
“Not yet.”
My words are white puffs. My fingers are cold. In a clump of grass by the shore of the canal a hightop Converse floats like a dirty duck. Beyond the next bridge the path narrows into bramble and low branches, gray slush. My feet are wet through. There’s color high on Arabelle’s face.
“Do you think Meryem would have gone this far?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Did she say anything else?”
“Not really. No. A dog crying. The smoke of some fire.”
“Maybe we missed something. Maybe, if we walk back, the same way . . .” Arabelle looks past me, into the thicket up ahead. She lifts her hand over her eyes to block the sun. A sleek-coated black cat walks past on four white paws. We watch it go. It tells us nothing.
“We should go back,” she says at last.
“I guess.”
“Maybe Felice has news. Maybe Savas is there, with the ladies.”
She blows air into her mittened hands, pulls her coat across her belly to save her baby from the wind. Lina, if it’s a girl, she’s said. Peter, if it’s a boy. The first red-headed, dark-skinned baby in the world—that’s what she calls it, what she imagines. You’ll be Aunt Ada. I’ve pictured a tiny thing with camera-click eyes in a house built of yarn, a thousand Turkish stitches. We walk side by side on the slushy path, beneath the silver gray of the weeping trees, the sun a glare and the canal sullen slow as syrup. “Savas!” I cry, and nobody answers, and Arabelle says that I have to be brave. I think of the story I told about fear, and what a liar I am, because I know what fear is, I know how it finds me.
Savas, please come. I am here.
I hear the sound of wings overhead, one of the big magpies from the top of St. Thomas Church. It slaps like it’s chained to the tree. Like it’s been leashed and it’s a war to get free. I hear the sound, and then I see it—the thing Savas has left behind.
“Arabelle?” But she has already seen it, too, and beside me she is running, holding her belly with her hands, tossing the ropes of her hair out of her face, away from the wind, until we both reach the tree where the magpie was, until she can help me up into the snaking branches, where Markus’s patchouli-scented purple shawl clings like a nest.
“He was here,” I say, and she shakes her head. Yes, because he was here. No, because now he is not.
“Take it,” she says. “For the police.” Leaning down now and finding a stick and drawing an X to mark the spot.
There are five. They sit in the dark well of the back room behind the shop. Headscarves. Thick socks. Nervous needles. On the walls behind them, hung, cellophaned, nailed, are the sweaters they’v
e made, signs in Turkish and German, photographs of Sandinistas, words stenciled in green: the world is not a foreign land—there are no foreigners. Felice has pushed back her dark hair with her hands. She sits on a bamboo stool, higher than the others, a pad of ecru-colored paper on her lap and a portable tank of kerosene at her feet, a wad of Kleenex in one fist. The three hoops in her one pierced ear make little cymbal sounds as she listens.
She doesn’t turn to us. She follows the talk.
Arabelle steps in, breathless, her coat open, her hair wild, as now the lady in the orange scarf and green cotton coat jabs her knitting needle toward the room’s one window at something she sees, some piece of evidence or story. She knows what has happened; it is clear. She has, like the other women gathered here, borne witness to the private hell of Savas and his mother. She knows what men will do to disobedient wives. She knows what sons will do for their mothers. I feel my heart, cloggy and dense, and now Arabelle walks to the center of the room, and everything goes still. She takes the shawl from the sack she had strapped across her chest, and explains the canal, the tree, the patchouli. One woman then another begins to cry. Others nod their heads, confirming.
Change the story, I want to say. Change the ending. Please.
Arabelle’s spine curves. Felice’s fingers knot. The talk goes too fast, and now the first woman, the orange and the green, lifts one hand and makes a pistol with her fist—cocks it and fires—and I cannot move in my wet socks and boots, cannot think, only
Don’t.
No.
Please.
But it’s clear. It is too true. The mother is murdered. The son is missing, still. Lost, perhaps or probably. I feel Arabelle’s arms around me. I hear the tinkle bell over the door out front, I turn to find the police, but they aren’t there. It’s Mutti who has come, and Omi behind her—one tiny and one small, both of them rearranged by the wind.